Also of interest... in distinctive storytellers

The Rules Do Not Apply

by Ariel Levy (Random House, $27)

Ariel Levy might be “the most retrogressive progressive writer we have,” said Jamie Fisher in The Washington Post. Her new memoir expands on an essay she wrote for The New Yorker about a late-term miscarriage, and though Levy married a woman, cheated on her partner, conceived via a sperm donor, and lost the baby while traveling abroad, she also dares to suggest that women’s choices are inevitably constrained. No matter: It’s her voice, “at once commanding and vulnerable,” that wins us over.

The Moth Presents: All These Wonders

edited by Catherine Burns (Crown, $25)

The stories told on the beloved radio show The Moth are nearly as varied as life itself, said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. This sampler offers 45 tales that are by turns “raw, wry, rueful, and confiding.” Garrison Keillor and Louis C.K. contribute one spoken story each, but so do scientists, musicians, and cops. In one standout, a nuclear engineer recalls looking for a friend in the aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima earthquake. The tale’s payoff “has the force of an epiphany.”

A Really Big Lunch

by Jim Harrison (Grove, $26)

Jim Harrison “lived as he wrote: vividly,” said Heller McAlpin in NPR.org. The prolific author, who died last year, was an unabashed hedonist, and these 47 essays on food, wine, and aging “bring him roaring to the page again in all his unapologetic immoderacy.” It would require the stamina he displayed in the title piece—which describes a 37-course meal served to him in Burgundy—to consume this volume whole. But even bite-size portions prove “deliciously filling.”

Compass

by Mathias Énard (New Directions, $27)

(Lorne Bridgman, Matthew Nguyen)

The narrator of this award-winning French novel is “a kind of reverse Scheherazade,” said Sam Sacks in The Wall Street Journal. Franz Ritter is a terminally ill scholar, a specialist in Middle Eastern song who’s doing nothing to hold off death by filling a sleepless night with 1,001 stories linked in his memory to an unrequited love affair. Franz’s digressiveness is a challenge as he ponders the great literature and music born of the collision of East and West, but he lays out an “astonishing banquet of learning.” ■